Amd OC brings NO extra Performance??

Gabe666

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Firstly, my OFFICE rig (cus I don't dare calling it a Gaming rig knowing what beast some of you out there have):

+ 7 very powerful high-performance case fans (3 near the cpu), of which I am very proud..NOTHING in my system EVER reaches 60 degrees Celsius(140F). (on 100% load: gpu max. 58, Cpu 47 max , mobo 42)
+FX 8370E (OC all cores 4.3ghz) with Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
+Gtx 1070 8GB
+Msi Gaming 970 Mobo
+16GB RAM
+Cougar GX800, 800-watt 80 PLUS Gold PSU (cus before I got the gtx1070,I had two rx480 in crossfire). PSU is mounted outside, ON the pc tower, because of air circulation and cable management reasons.
+128gb ssd and some hdds
+3x 24' 1080p 75hz 1ms monitors (but in gaming I use only 1 cus it's distracting otherwise..didn't know this before I bought them :/ ).
+Win10 Pro

So..as you may know, the fx8370e is the same cpu as the 8370 but clocked at 3.3ghz instead of 4.0ghz.. that was too slow for me (even for the gtx1050ti that i had before), so I carefully oc-ed to 4.3ghz with much increase in performance, I'd say best performance possible from a AM3+ system without getting a 9000 series Fx with catastrophic wattage.

ALL GAMES and Programs run perfectly and fast. I really don't miss having an Intel CPU at all..!!!EXCEPT in BATTLEFIELD 1 !!!. There, my Cpu ist ALWAYS on 100% load (comparing with 40% on bf3 or bf4 which I still play) and as a result the gtx1070 only between 60-80%. I do reach my desired 75fps of my monitor but often have ''lags'' in the 30s or 40s FPS which is really a shame when you have a 400€ gtx1070.

So I thought to myself: ''perfect temperatures, oc has worked for me until now, lets go higher''. 4.3ghz->4.5ghz..so a 200mhz x 8 increase. I always do all my oc in Bios, I only slightly increased the voltage to make it stable. I cannot change the FSB at all, so I only increase the multiplier (22.5x)
Boot fine, but STRANGELY the Task manager still says Cpu Max Freq 4.3ghz like before. :ouch:
So then I open Cpu Z and there it is 4.5ghz core clock. :bounce: So I test with the built-in Benchmark 2 times and behold: worse results then I got at 4.3ghz.
This cannot be!! so I run my trusty Geekbench 3 Pro (64bit) A COUPLE OF TIMES ..and again slightly worse results than 4.3ghz.
Can it be that a CPU just reaches a certain Max Performance Level and stays there no matter what you do to it?
But then why do some guys talk about getting to 5ghz and above with these fx cpus? ..(some with exactly this 8370(e)) ...just for bragging rights?

Please no comments like: ''buy a Intel cpu for bf1''. I know even some i3's are better than this but if it were only the cpu to change, I would do it immediately, but I have to change the Mobo and Ram..so like at least 400-500€ ($500+)which I don't have now.
I'm only interested in why Cpu performance doesn't increase with Ghz number anymore.


 
Solution
I've come across articles about chipset latency settings. Sometimes there is a threshold where an FSB setting causes the chipset to down clock it's timings and there is a range of OC where there is no improvement. With a lot of Intel chipsets this happens past the official 400fsb, and there is no performance increase gain until 450fsb. I know this isn't AMD related but it might be similar.


The 8370 is most likely thermal throtheling or the motherboard can't sustain the extra power draw from the oc (most 970 board have issues with this). Either way the 8370 can't achieve your desired fps as it's simply to weak for bf1 to get a steady 60 fps.

I did have an fx 8320 that could do 5.2ghz and it was nice but I sold mine to go for a newer platform as it just wasn't enough for games (was 1 year ago) and it wasn't good enough anymore for other tasks.
 
Even if there was NO thermal throttling, AND you managed to get to 4.5GHz vs 4.3GHz at all times that's still less than a 5% maximum boost in completely CPU-bottlenecked situations.

You are CPU bottlenecked in most scenarios and there's very little you can do about it other than enjoying what you have or rebuilding the core system with Intel i7 or Ryzen R5-1600/R7-1700.

*And the "EVO" is an okay cooler but everyone I've talked to says it's insufficient to overclock an FX-8370 by much so you are likely throttling down as you attempt a further overclock.

I think a better CPU COOLER is a good start. I'll post a link or two.
 
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/Ztp323/cryorig-cpu-cooler-h5ultimate
That looks like a good value.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/46tCmG/noctua-cpu-cooler-nhd14
That Noctua is more expensive but works well. It's 3-pin I believe so you you need either a 3-pin CPU fan header or 4-pin that supports 3-pin as well (most do some don't and you would need to hookup a fan to test).

other: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YwGkcf/be-quiet-cpu-cooler-bk018

All of these can cool better while keeping fan noise down a bit as well (compared to the "EVO"). I suspect your fan gets pretty loud. You'll still want the motherboard fan software setup to the best profile.
 
contrary to what you might think, the fx-8370 is NOT an 8-core CPU. It's actually a 4-core CPU with each core processing 2 threads. But far far worse than a modern i3 does with only 2 cores and 4 threads.

BF1 is known to have bottlenecking issues on i5 and below CPUs.

So you need a better CPU.
 

Gabe666

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Jan 25, 2017
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i run it in dx 12 because it actually brings 10 more fps than dx 11.. In dx 11 the cpu is spiking between 80-99% (and gpu same 75% as in dx 12 ) ..with dx 12 cpu is 100% all the time ..its a straight line (i let msi afterburner in the background..) the cpu doesnt exceed 47 degrees celsius.. But maybe the socket or the Vrms are getting hotter...idk.. I dont trust hwmonitor readings anymore..(at least not on amd boards)
Thanks for your time
 

Gabe666

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Jan 25, 2017
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Thank you for your answer ..but the OFFICIAL RECOMENDED requirement for bf1 is Fx8350 and i have an even better one: fx8370 (8370e but oc-ed higher than stock 8370)... the minimum requirements as you say would be fx 6000 series..but we all know thats not enough.
EA just * up with the amd requirements..

<Language, please>
 
I've come across articles about chipset latency settings. Sometimes there is a threshold where an FSB setting causes the chipset to down clock it's timings and there is a range of OC where there is no improvement. With a lot of Intel chipsets this happens past the official 400fsb, and there is no performance increase gain until 450fsb. I know this isn't AMD related but it might be similar.
 
Solution

Gabe666

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Jan 25, 2017
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thank you! you are the only\first one that actually gave me a plausible answer to my question (why 4.5ghz overclock gives worse benchmark results than 4.3ghz?). Photonboy really took a lot of his time to search a better cooler for me and so on(and I am grateful for that), but didn't give me an answer to this strange problem. The others basically just said: ''buy Intel'' or ''you cant run Bf1 with that cpu'' -answers which don't really help me in any way. So I choose you as the best solution ;-)
Like I said, the FSB on this Mobo\Cpu combo is and has always been locked at 200 no matter what cpu freq. The NB and HT-Link Freq. is set to max. possible: 2400mhz (from 2200mhz stock).
Also PCI-E Freq is locked to 100mhz.. And that I know for sure should be able to go higher.
I think this Mobo (as beautiful as it is) is not so good for overclock after all... (although it brags all over the retail box about it, and that's the reason I bought it).
 


+1 (what he said!)
 


Close.
I think they do not use the word CORE anymore as it gets confusing, and they definitely do not call it a 4-core CPU but rather a 4-MODULE CPU. It is easiest to just look at the diagram:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture)#/media/File:AMD_Bulldozer_block_diagram_(8_core_CPU).PNG

(copy the entire URL or you get a link to a real bulldozer vehicle LOL)

Instead of two, fully separate CORES each module has two integer clusters for each thread of code but these share resources like the Instruction Decoder.

This is problematic because for example the main thread of a game instead of having a full core is sharing likely even when the CPU is only partially used. In fact, a game might have done better if you disabled access to the 2nd thread in each module (not sure if that is possible on that CPU but it was for Intel hyperthreading).

Hyperthreading is similar in the concept of two threads running on one CPU section, but architecturally much different. Essentially it is just a normal core with some clever buffering to cycle in an extra thread of code during the times the CPU is normally idle due to waiting for new data from system memory (so the more efficient you get the data to the CPU core the less benefit hyperthreading would have such as optimally programming with knowledge of the CPU cache hierarchy to do a better job of BUFFERING the data to be processed... something that will help RYZEN a lot likely).

You could get a 30% boost I think in ideal situations meaning that the core without HT was left waiting about 23% of the time.

Hyperthreading had some issues earlier on to the point people would often just disable it but those got sorted out in Windows. The Intel HT design makes a lot more sense in retrospect (hindsight is 20-20). Make less cores but FASTER at processing, and give a boost with HT for well threaded programs (or multi-tasking). And if you need more than this you can always jump to a very expensive setup. YAY! (of course that is changing now with RYZEN and THREADRIPPER)

BULLDOZER was in theory a good idea when it was released however multi-threading applications were slow to happen and software did a poor job of overcoming the SHARING of resource issues. I suspect it looked good on paper or even in testing with very optimized code

Fast forward many years and BF1 with DX12 gets a boost allowing better threading to take advantage of more of the CPU:
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2016/11/02/directx-12-unleashes-amd-fx-processors-in-battlefield-1

Unfortunately there were stuttering issues since tacking on DX12 to an existing game is not trivial. Not sure if it is still a problem but last I heard it was either higher average FPS with more stuttering or vice versa.